Up to 3,000 rounds per minute. Turkish anti-drone system with new weaponry
Defence24 · · 4 min read
Turkey's Tolga has until now been a layered sensor-and-jammer architecture; adding twin 20 mm cannon turns it into a hard-kill system with a gun layer that sits between soft-kill electronic attack and missile intercept. For procurement planners the signal is that Ankara is converging on the same counter-UAS stack architecture NATO buyers are pursuing, and MKE is positioning itself as a domestic full-system integrator rather than a component supplier. The rate-of-fire claim matters less than the cost-per-engagement economics it implies against low-end drone swarms.
The headline number — up to 3,000 rounds per minute from twin 20 mm barrels — invites the wrong comparison. This is not a new gun. It is a statement about architecture. Turkey's Tolga counter-drone family has, in its public iterations, been built around detection, tracking and electronic disruption: radar and electro-optical sensors feeding jammers and, in some configurations, command links to other effectors. What MKE has now shown is a gun module integrated into that architecture and demonstrated with the Turkish Army. The significance is that Tolga is being pushed from a soft-kill, deny-and-disrupt system toward a layered hard-kill one, with cannon fire as the middle rung between electronic attack and guided interceptors.
The mechanics deserve care. A 20 mm cannon is a short-range, line-of-sight effector. Its value against small unmanned aircraft comes from cheap, reusable magazines, fast engagement cycles and the ability to put a burst on a maneuvering target without expending a guided missile that costs orders of magnitude more than the threat. The trade-offs are equally real: gun engagements depend on precise cueing from the sensor layer, they consume ammunition quickly at high rates of fire, and they raise questions about debris, rules of engagement and the safety of firing bursts into airspace shared with civilians and friendly aircraft. A twin-gun module also implies a stabilized mount, a fire-control chain and enough power and cooling on the platform — vehicle, fixed site or vessel — to sustain it. None of that is exotic, but integrating it cleanly with a counter-UAS battle-management system is the actual engineering achievement, not the rate-of-fire figure.
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The Turkish company MKE has presented a new component of the Tolga anti-drone system – a module equipped with twin 20 mm cannons. It has already made a successful debut during two Turkish Army